


Liquid Dynamics

by speccygeekgrrl



Series: even the mistakes aren't really mistakes at all [7]
Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Chinese Food, Drunkenness, Gen, Honesty, Mad Scientists, Obliviousness, Slow Burn, a complicated family history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-27 20:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10816563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/pseuds/speccygeekgrrl
Summary: Kinga takes Max for granted. Max can only take that for so long. He thought it would be a little longer than this, though.





	Liquid Dynamics

Kinga wanted to follow in her father's footsteps... but not too closely. He'd been an engineer, but her talents tended more toward chemistry and computer programming. Anyways, he'd never had that much success in his goal of world domination, and the world was different now from when he'd been trying. Really different.

Her first thought for an invention of her own was some sort of social media platform, but it was hard to be more evil than Facebook. Media, though, other types of media, that could be promising. She'd had a little luck with sound wave reproduction through a liquid medium. Maybe that would take her somewhere if she developed it.

Gizmonic Institute gave her real lab space, finally, and she got Max registered as her official lab assistant. She barely registered the way older Gizmonic scientists would stare when the two of them walked down the hall. She didn't look too much like her father, but Max was truly his father's son, and there were still Gizmonic urban legends about the eerie screaming that had come from Deep 13 back in the bad old days. The looks they got now were a mixture of pity and curiosity. Max noticed more than she did-- he might look like Frank but he was a good deal more self-aware than Frank had been. Kinga was too forward-looking to see what was in front of her face half the time.

She split her focus onto several projects: the liquid media thing was the one she let Gizmonic know about, but the genetic engineering stuff was so, so illegal, and the moon base was something she didn't want to owe to Gizmonic after she made it happen. There were other, smaller things, of course, the sort of thing she could present in the standard Gizmonic greeting of an invention exchange, but those three big things were what she put most of her attention into. Honestly, the little stuff she could more or less leave to Max once she'd sketched out the ideas; he wasn't a scientist but he wasn't incompetent either, but then again, neither was he skilled enough to help with the heavy science concepts.

They spent a lot of late nights together in the lab, until Kinga took for granted that he'd be available whenever she wanted him. That meant that when she wanted him and he didn't immediately leap to answer her summons, she got annoyed very easily, and the more annoyed she got the less willing she was to keep it to herself. Finally, she got mad enough to drive to his apartment and find out what precisely was more important than she was.

She pounded on the door of his apartment and the sound of the TV through the wall went silent. Again she hammered on the door, turning the full fury of her gaze onto Max when he pulled the door open and gave her a look of pure bemusement.

"Kinga? What are you-- _why_ are you here?" 

"Why am I here? Why aren't _you_ at the lab? I've been texting you for hours!" He blinked slowly, and her brow furrowed. "...are you _drunk_? Have you been here getting wasted instead of helping me?"

"I'm a grown man," he said stiffly, but his gaze dropped to the floor. "I can drink by myself if I damn well feel like it. And I didn't get any of your texts. My phone hasn't made a sound all day."

"Oh, for god's sake." She pushed past him into the apartment and cast a critical eye over the coffee table, but it wasn't full of empties she could mock him over. There was just one glass next to a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He'd turned the TV off before he got the door. She flipped it back on to make fun of whatever he was watching... and put the remote back down on the table and bit her lip. He was reviewing the old experiments. Hell, he was taking _notes_ on them.

"I don't deserve to be treated like this," he muttered, rubbing his eyes hard like he could make himself sober up through sheer willpower. "I'm your assistant, not your dog, okay? You can't just whistle and have me come running. I'm allowed to have my own life outside of you." He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, and doing a half-assed job of it. "If you needed me today, couldn't you have said something when I was with you yesterday? I thought I was finally getting a day to myself."

"Sit down before you fall down," she said, less harshly than she intended. He huffed an annoyed breath and did as he was told, and she sat next to him, looking from the TV to his notebook to his face and back again. "You're actually reviewing them?"

"You told me to," he sighed. "There's a lot of them, you know? Years and years worth of tapes. And... honestly, Kinga, it's pretty fucked up."

"Don't tell me you're getting cold feet."

"Me? When have I _ever_ backed down from something you wanted me to do? I'm not even talking about the experiments being fucked up, although they are. But... seeing the way your dad treated my dad is..." He propped his elbows on his knees and dropped his face into his hands. "It was one thing to hear about it," he mumbled. "Dad always made it sound like a big joke. But actually seeing it..."

"Oh, come on." She patted his shoulder lightly. "I'm not as screwed up as my dad was. Grandma always said he went off the deep end after he got struck by lightning. I'm not that much of a sadist." He snorted humorlessly, and she punched his shoulder instead. "I'm not!"

"Sure. Whatever you say, Kinga."

"You're awfully outspoken right now."

"I'm awfully drunk right now." He wouldn't look at her. She wasn't sure she could blame him. "Look, can you just-- go? You can give me hell for it tomorrow, but I can't deal with it right now."

"You know what? No. I can't." Part of it was just sheer contrariness. Part of it was that she'd never seen him anything more than giggly tipsy, and this drunken honesty was interesting. 

"Kinga. Please. Leave me alone."

"No. I won't give you shit about it tonight, but I'm not leaving, either." He let out a groan of despair and finally lifted his head out of his hands to give her the most bleak look of resignation she'd ever seen on him. "Jeez, Max, you're acting like I'm here to torture you." Wordlessly, he reached for the remote, rewound the tape for a minute, and hit play-- to display Dr. Forrester in the act of maiming Frank. "...oh," she said. He didn't say anything. A lot of screaming came from the TV. After a long moment she reached for the glass and poured herself a hefty shot.

"If you're not going to leave me alone, can you at least not drink all my booze?" She didn't even respond, just swallowed the whiskey and gasped as it burned its way down her throat.

"Look. Max. I'm not-- I'm not that much like my father. Okay? That's not the kind of person I am. You're--" She paused, reached over to take his hand and frowned when he pulled it out of her grasp. "You're my best friend, okay?"

"I'm your only friend."

"That's not--" Finally he looked over at her, eyes narrowed, and she winced. "Okay, yeah, that's true. You are. But if you're my only friend then I definitely can't afford to damage you that badly." She tried to make a joke out of it. He didn't laugh. "You don't.... you don't really think I'd do that to you, do you?"

"Honestly? I'm not sure what you would or wouldn't do." He took a deep breath, then another, then shook his head. "You're capricious. You always have been. And you're a lot meaner than you think you are. You don't ever default to kindness, any time you're nice there's something calculated about it." Her eyes widened. He frowned but didn't look away. "You can't even tell me I'm wrong," he said softly. "I wish-- I wish you would do something nice. Without an ulterior motive. Without trying to manipulate me. Just one nice thing."

For a moment they just sat in silence, staring at each other. Max looked almost like he was about to cry. Kinga sort of felt like she wanted to cry. What could she do to make this right? "Give me a chance."

"When do you ever ask me for things? You just take them. You might as well take this too." She bit her lip and then stood up. She turned off the TV, ejected the tape of the experiment from the VCR and slid it back into its cardboard case. He watched her silently as she moved around his apartment: picking up the whiskey bottle and capping it as she walked into the kitchen, coming back out with a bottle of gatorade that she handed to him and the flyer for their favorite Chinese place. She didn't ask him what he wanted before she called, but she ordered two of his favorite things, one of hers, and one thing they both liked, and then put her phone down on the table and looked down at her hands for a moment.

"I'm not trying to bribe you with food," she said. "But I'm starving and you should probably eat something." 

"Probably," he agreed without being agreeable. She reached for him again and this time he didn't pull away, letting her take his hand and lace their fingers together.

"You're right. You don't deserve to be treated like I've been treating you. You're-- you're indispensable to me. Literally indispensable. You've been at my side my entire life, I don't know what I'd be doing without you. I'd be... I'd probably be normal," she said with a proper amount of disgust for that idea. He snorted.

"I don't think that's possible."

"You never know. I could have been adopted by missionaries. Ew, I could have been religious." That got him to smile, at least. "But I'm not. Religious, or normal. And neither are you. We're mad scientists, Max. It's what we were born for. And we need each other to reach our full potential."

"Do we need each other? Or do you just need me?" Her mouth dropped open in shock, but he bulled on ahead. "Because I could-- I could still be normal. Maybe. If I just walked away right now."

"But you won't," Kinga said uncertainly. "Come on, Max, doesn't that sound deadly boring? Who wants to be normal? We're going to change the world. Normal people don't change the world. The world chews up normal people and spits them out. We're better than that."

"We could be better than that," he said. "I'm not sure that we are right now." She tightened her fingers around his, saying without words that she wouldn't let him walk even if he tried it... which was, she reflected, really just proving the point he was making. 

"What do I need to say to make you believe me?"

"That's the wrong question to ask," he said sadly. "And it's never going to lead you around to the right one." He gently disengaged his hand from hers and clasped both hands around the bottle, rolling its coolness between his palms. She thought about that for a while, watching him not look at her, then reached for the remote and found some fluffy rom-com to fill the silence. Max loved that sort of movie, even though she thought they were all moronic. He didn't laugh once in the half an hour it took their food to arrive, though.

She hadn't been kidding when she said she was starving. She took half the pork lo mein and the entire carton of sweet and sour chicken, pouring the sticky pink sauce into the box and mixing it around with her chopsticks. Max poked a bit listlessly at his kung pao shrimp, but once he started eating his appetite asserted itself. They didn't talk while they ate, but her mind kept turning the problem over and over, not finding the angle she needed until she was wiping her mouth clean at the end. She waited for him to finish, then cleared the boxes off the table.

When she came back into the living room, she didn't sit down next to him again. She came up behind the couch and settled her hands on his shoulders. He tensed up when she leaned down to put her mouth behind his ear.

"Max... I'm sorry." She could feel him stop breathing, the sudden cessation of movement under her hands, until he gasped in a breath and shuddered. "I'm sorry for treating you so badly. I know better now. Things will change. I swear."

She was half lying, but he didn't care. He'd never thought he'd hear her apologize for anything; he'd known her since birth and this was the first time she'd ever said sorry to him. She kept her hands on his shoulders and felt him shake.

"...are you crying?" she asked after a moment.

"Shut up," he said through his tears. She kept her laugh silent, leaning down to wrap her arms around him and hug him from behind.

"Oh, Max." He tried to push her off but she clung harder, digging the point of her chin into one shoulder to anchor herself there. "Tomorrow, okay? We'll start fixing things tomorrow."

"Whatever you say, Kinga." At least this time he sounded like he meant it. That was enough for her to go on.


End file.
